Hello, we are Nick and Astrid. We watch movies almost every night. Today seems like a good day for a New Year's resolution and ours is to start this blog about our film experiences. This afternoon we watched El Cid (1961. Dir. Anthony Mann) –a film Nick watched as a child often at Christmas in England. It was Astrid's first time with El Cid and she was rather bored. Nick enjoyed the intensity, Mann's ambitious scale and the unsentimental approach to such an epic. Astrid was disturbed by what Charlton Heston came to represent later in life, while at the same time mesmerized by Sophia Loren's eyes. The idea of this blog is that we will write our separate commentaries on whatever film we watch, sometimes more sometimes less. For us it will be a record of our viewing habits over the course of the next year.